Plain Old Good Teaching

There are a lot of elaborate theories and vogue words that try to describe what good teaching entails. Sadly, some of them have little, if any grounding in evidence at all. Others do, but they are difficult to carry out and their effects are small.

A teacher has limited time, and this makes your time a valuable commodity. When you choose to spend your time on one thing, there will be other things you end up not doing. Therefore, it is essential that you know what teaching strategies have the most impact on student learning. Collectively, I call these strategies the foundations ofgood teaching.

Why? Because they are essential. Many of the more progressive and elaborate teaching approaches depend upon them. Without a strong foundation, higher-order teaching strategies don’t work. These strategies do not cover the breadth or complexity of great teaching; however, the capture the crucial core of what good teaching entails. If you ever find yourself with limited time, these are the seven strategies you should never forego.

Good Teaching Strategy #1: Effective Lesson Goals

You should write a goal for every lesson.
For those goals to be effective, they must clarify what success (and therefore, failure) entails. What is that you want your students to know? How will they have to show such understanding? What practical things must they be able to do? This clarity helps you focus your teaching activities, and to make choices about the relevance of tangents and on-the-spot ideas. It also helps your students to understand why a certain activity is important.

It is also important that your goals are challenging. When goals are challenging, and students know their success or failure will be clearly apparent, it motivates students to do what it takes to succeed. Goals that are easy don’t do this. Goals that are too hard don’t work either.

Good Teaching Strategy #2: Appropriate Teacher Instruction

Students need to be explicitly taught what they need to know and explicitly shown how to do the things they must be able to do. Too often, well-intentioned teachers send their students off to do independent tasks (either individually or in groups) that they are not adequately prepared for.

Appropriate instruction includes sharing, modelling, explaining and providing worked examples. Of course, there is more to teaching than these traditional forms of instruction. However, they remain critical as they allow you to gradually release responsibility for learning to your students rather than throwing them in the deep end.

Good Teaching Strategy #3: Genuine Mental Engagement

You need to get your students engaging with the material you have taught them, and you must ensure that their engagement is real.

Things such as physical movement, using computers and group work may give the appearance of engagement, but looks can be deceiving. Authentic learning occurs when students mentally respond to what they have been told or shown. It is this mental engagement that is critical.

When interacting with new material, you can engage students through having them:

Actively connect what you have taught them to what they thought they already knew

Rehearse key pieces of information to help them the retain what they have learned

Take notes (scaffolded if necessary)

Complete matching activities

Label, or draw and label diagrams

Define key vocabulary

Informally test each other in pairs

When trying to help students gain a deeper understanding of the material they have already touched on, you should get them to engage with the material by having them make connections between different chunks of information. For example, you could have them:

Sequence events chronologically or as cause-effect chains

Compare how to two things are similar while contrasting how they are different

Organise and classify information into groups or hierarchies

Analyze the various properties of one or more things

Justify why a given statement is true or untrue using the information they have just learned

Can some of these activities be done in groups? Yes, they can! However, it is important to note that:

Group work itself does not make the students more engaged

Research shows group work is more powerful following some form of individual engagement

Good Teaching Strategy #4: Plenty of Practice

Technically, practice is a form of engagement; however, it is worth mentioning on its own for two reasons. The first of these is that practice refers to what students must be able to, rather than what they must know and understand. Secondly, practice, in its own right,has a strong connection with student achievement.

Within a single lesson, you get students to practice things after you have shown the students how to do. Within the popular I Do – We Do – You Do model:

You show students how to do the things they must be able to do during the I Do phase

Students do guided practice during the We Do phase

Students do independent practice during the You Do phase

However, practicing things once during a single lesson is not enough. Students need to practice doing something several times, over different days.

Research shows that it is a good idea to practice new material at the start of subsequent related lessons. However, it also shows that mixed revision sessions (i.e. sample questions from different topics or even different subjects) are powerful as well. Students tend to do worse but learn more when completing mixed revision sessions.

Good Teaching Strategy #5: Feedback

There is a well-known saying that practice makes perfect. As you saw above, practice really is an essential part of learning. However, in the words of renowned psychologist Tony Buzan, practice only leads to repetition – not perfection.

If you are doing a set task correctly or well, then practice will help you. However, if you are doing it wrong (or poorly), then your practice only leads to repeating the wrong thing.

This is why it is crucial that you give your students feedback on their practice attempts. Feedback allows them to learn from their mistakes and refine their efforts accordingly. Furthermore, research repeatedly shows that feedback is one the most effective (if not the most effective) teaching strategies you can use.

First you teach them, then you get them to practice, then you give them feedback, and finally you get them to do a similar task again.

Good Teaching Strategy #6: Relevant Homework

Is homework worth it? The answer is that it depends. The homework set by secondary teachers has a large impact on students’ subsequent results. However, this is not the case for homework set in primary schools.

Therefore, secondary teachers should continue giving homework in the way that they traditionally do. However, the advice for primary teachers is not so clear cut. Most primary schools require you to set homework, and many parents expect it.

If you are a primary teacher and you are going to set homework, you must make sure it is relevant – that is, the homework must be directly related to what you have taught the kids in class. Typical homework sheets, spelling words only learned at home, and random research tasks are not the way to go. Try setting practice questions of tasks students have recently mastered, or give them activities (see above) to re-engage with material already covered.

About the Author

Shaun Killian is an experienced teacher and principal with a passion for helping students to excel. He believes that assisting teachers to adopt evidence-based education is the best way to make this happen. Shaun is committed to bringing you practical advice based on solid research.

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This article reminded me of the absolutely key strategies that are sometimes forgotten due to the time limit and one reason or another during lessons. I’m going to put these strategies on the pinboard above my desk. Thanks for sharing!

Shaun your article Plain Old Good Teaching is a really useful article that I will forward to a number of Principals to use with their staff. Your references are excellent and educators will appreciate the evidence base you have provided.
Thank you for sharing.